A Talking Cure: The King’s Speech

It used to be that movies about English kings and queens were all about palace intrigues, doomed love affairs, and wars against jumped-up chaps like Napoleon. These days they’re about royals coming to grips with the modern world. This theme gets a striking new spin in The King’s Speech, a crowd-pleaser—it wowed the Toronto Film Festival—that is the odds-on favorite in this year’s Oscar race. Based on a little-known (to me, anyway) true story, Tom Hooper’s resolutely unstuffy film shows us how the man who would become King George VI had to battle a crippling personal weakness on his unlikely journey to the throne.

When we first meet him, he’s still Albert, Duke of York (Colin Firth), an anxious but honorable man with one mortifying flaw: Faced with an audience or radio microphone, “Bertie” (as he’s known) promptly melts into a puddle of hesitancy and stuttering. In a last-ditch attempt to help him get over this tiresome problem, his wife, the Duchess of York (Helena Bonham Carter) takes him to meet one Lionel Logue (Geoffrey Rush), a failed Australian actor who offers his own cockeyed brand of speech therapy. While not the first speech therapist the duke has met, let alone the first commoner, Lionel may well be the first commoner Albert’s ever had to take seriously. And he doesn’t like it. Even as he’s impressed by Lionel’s techniques, he’s offended by his impertinence. So the question becomes, will Albert allow this guy to help him? It’s a question that gains importance when his brother, King Edward VIII (Guy Pearce), chooses to give up the throne rather than give up his twice-divorced love, Wallis Simpson (Eve Best). Suddenly, Bertie is heir to the crown. Will England’s new king shame and embarrass his nation every time he’s required to address them?

While David Seidler’s script is too eager to offer the cozy satisfactions Americans find in British period pieces, it’s directed with enormous skill by Hooper, who has established himself as a master of putting across real-life stories of all kinds, from the life of an American president in HBO’s John Adams to the vainglorious rise-and-fall of Leeds United soccer coach Brian Clough in last year’s The Damned United. In The King’s Speech, Hooper offers the sumptuous pleasures you expect from movies about the ruling elite, yet he doesn’t lose sight of what gives the story its historical piquancy. If Edward’s abdication marks a turning point for the royal family—henceforth, their private lives become the media’s daily bread—then Bertie’s struggles with public speaking remind us of the monarchy’s shifting demands. Where earlier kings were scarcely, if ever, heard by their subjects, in a democratic society with mass communications, a good ruler must be able to enter people’s homes via radio or TV and talk to them directly.

Of course, we wouldn’t care about any of this if we weren’t swayed by the actors. In this, Hooper could hardly have been more blessed. He wins amusing turns from Pearce and Bonham Carter—who becomes more effortlessly entertaining with each passing year—and does even better with Rush, whom I’ve always thought an Australian ham. Here, he plays an Australian ham, and really, he couldn’t be better. Working with commanding delicacy, Rush captures perfectly the alloy of steel and subservience that makes Lionel able to square off with a future king. As for George VI himself, this may not be the greatest role of Firth’s career (I liked him even better in A Single Man just last year), but it draws on his defining qualities—the manly good looks, the air of stubborn decency, the ability to convey a complex inner life with the merest blink of an eye, and the knack of finding something original in what might seem obvious. Just consider how inventively he does Bertie’s stammering. This is not the adorable word repetitions of 1990s Hugh Grant nor the st-st-stuttering you get from Porky Pig. It’s something deeper and more painful, as if his words are being throttled in his throat before they can emerge. Needless to say, such strangled speech is Bertie’s problem, not Firth’s, as we’ll all be reminded once awards season begins, and week after week, this wonderful actor steps up to the podium to accept his latest statuette.